1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an information processing system and information processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advancement of computing technology these days, computers are ubiquitous in the office and home. With this widespread use, computers are capable of supporting various types of application. For instance, conferences are held frequently in industrial activities or other activities in everyday life. Computers can be employed for supporting the operation of the conference, when they are used in the conference room.
Decisions made in the conference can be reviewed by reading the minutes to be issued later. Also, there is proposed a technique of supporting the review of the conference when the user views the video that has captured the conference. At this time, it is important how efficiently a desired scene can be searched for. Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 07-56748 (hereinafter, referred to as Document 1) describes a technique of creating a chart with remarks during the conference and making a list so that the user can specify a time to view the image of the specified time,
With the conventional method as described above, however, the related image of the time (the image that corresponds to the specified time) cannot be searched for with the positional relationship of the object and the person in the real scene that is not included in the image. As a technique for solving this problem, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-234722 (hereinafter, referred to as Document 2) proposes a technique of receiving the content that the user can remember easily as a query and returning the matched scene to the user. There may be a technique of storing the positions of the participants and the documents used in the conference as context information of the conference. With this technique, the user is able to view the context information and access the detailed context information while recalling the content of the conference.
Nevertheless, an image searching method does not cover all the positional relationships of the objects and persons in a real space. For example, in Document 2, a conference room is selected at first, and then the person and object are arranged, Unless the user can select the conference room, one of some standard layouts is selected to arrange the person and object. However, if the user can remember the arrangement of the person and object, yet if the user cannot remember the layout of the conference room, the afore-described method cannot be utilized. In addition, as the context information of the conference to be viewed is increased, it takes the user much time to search for the information that the user likes to obtain.